101–110 of 169 posts
If you're not of the "I'm writing because I can't not" personality, you might also want to consider self publishing book statistics. http://www.bowker.com/documents/self-publishing-report-in-un...
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There is a book out there called "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass. The book was a tremendously help for me in deconstructing my plot and characters. I rewrote and even rearranged entire chapters. I had subplots that had no closure that I rewrote to provide an ending. I invite you to check out my novel's Amazon page and read some of the reviews. Even the negative reviews praise the story itself, while slam…
Would you mind answering a few questions? I'm curious how you published your novel (self vs traditional), how you marketed, what your sales were like, etc.
Scrivener exports to Word, and various other formats. Working with large manuscripts in Word is a challenge, and it lacks many of the writing features of Scrivener. I've personally never had a problem with Scrivener's Word exporter, and have never felt like I needed to purchase Word.
One thing I would suggest, which isn't mentioned in the article, is to join a writing group. It will give you an opportunity to both give and receive constructive criticism, see what works and what doesn't, and will help improve your work overall (if you listen to the criticisms, anyway).
I think the author missed the most important point (maybe they haven't gotten this far yet): marketing and especially market-fit. If you just want to release an ebook or even in paper, you can do that easily. If you want to release an ebook and have it be a success, that's really hard . It's hard even for traditional publishers, and it's certainly not any easier for self-published authors. Anecdote: I helped my grand…
Personally, I wanted to write a story about Lisp machines, Bostrom-inspired Artificial Intelligences, and a journey of discovery/adventure in the vein of my favorite stories (www.zhubert.com/reading). Not everyone gets excited about Lisp machines, so I'm not expecting a mainstream market.
That said, marketing was out of scope of my original article and quite a challenging problem, I agree.
> The lingua franca for most writing is Microsoft Word so you’ll have to buy that eventually... I don't understand why something as ubiquitous as writing necessitates spending $100 on software from Microsoft. A plain text editor works out of the box. If you have a need for more complex formatting you could use LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Pages (comes free with a new Mac/iPad), WPS Office, etc. I get that Word has is the…
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I definitely agree with your initial post, I'm just not able to offer advice on how to write a good book as I may, or may not, know how :) In the writing groups I've participated in, there seem to be a number of authors that are scared off by the process of getting their work out there. I'm hopeful that this post will help them overcome the technical hurdles in doing so.
There is a book out there called "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass. The book was a tremendously help for me in deconstructing my plot and characters. I rewrote and even rearranged entire chapters. I had subplots that had no closure that I rewrote to provide an ending. I invite you to check out my novel's Amazon page and read some of the reviews. Even the negative reviews praise the story itself, while slam…
How to self-publish a paperback novel, that is. Looks like a lot of good advice! For my use case (self-publishing a digital-only book): I wrote "Learn Java the Hard Way" using Leanpub and I was pleased with the experience, but their build tools are closed-source and sort-of creaky and the tweak-compile-preview cycle is WAY too slow for my workflow. I intend to use Softcover for my next one. Recently I switched to Gum…
Does Gumroad have a solution for VAT? That was one of the things that lead me to use Amazon instead. Happy to update the post with alternatives.
Not the person you asked, and haven't tried the feature out myself, but saw this a while ago:
How We’re Handling VAT at Gumroad: http://blog.gumroad.com/post/110080508463/vat
Here is an excerpt from that page:
[ We’ve talked a lot in the past about how we approach building Gumroad: We ask ourselves what creators are spending time on that isn’t making things, and then we figure out how to do those things for them.
We are tackling VAT in the same way. Going forward, this is what creators on Gumroad need to do to properly handle VAT for their digital products:
Go back to making awesome stuff.
In other words, we’re on it. Gumroad will collect VAT as required and remit it to the EU. You won’t need to fill out any forms, register for anything, or send anything out. Your (EU-based) customers, will see (and pay) the added VAT on their purchases. ]
:)
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With this approach, your novel becomes an average of what the masses like to read, rather than what you wanted to say. Engineered for the masses, so to speak. Which, of course, could explain why King is so successful.
IMO, this is an artistic fallacy that needs to die. Responding and adjusting to feedback doesn't undermine the integrity of a work or weaken its authenticity. Cycles of feedback and iteration are common to all work in every medium. Obviously, you can take responding to feedback too far, but the idea of the artist-in-a-tower-birthing-a-fully-grown-work-whole is an inaccurate idea at best, and a damaging assumption at…
NOTE: Step 2: Write the Novel ... You know, the easy part. For those who have never written a novel, writer is being sarcastic here. The equivalent in terms of reference more familiar to the regulars on HN might well be: "Step 2: study for a CS degree, then decide which industry you intend to disrupt, learn how it works, and come up with a strategy. Oh, and write the killer app." This is just the framework for the bu…
Writing Singular was probably the most emotionally trying and, at the same time, rewarding challenge I've tackled. It even feels weird to describe it that way, it's simply been a part of me for the last two years.
I'm curious how that changes from the first book to the twenty-first?